Offering customizable products is a great way to stand out and create a unique shopping experience for your customers. With just a few simple steps, you can enable personalization for your Shopify products using Printful. Once personalization is enabled, orders with personalized products will import as drafts and require you to apply the customer’s text before fulfillment.
Step 1: Create a personalized product
To get started, you can either add a new product from the catalog or modify an existing listing.
- To create a new product, go to the Product catalog. Choose the product you want to personalize and click Start designing.
- To update an existing product, go to Stores → View store (or My products → Published), find the product, and click Edit → Edit design.
Step 2: Add the personalized text layer
Once you’re in the Design Maker, click Text in the left-hand menu, add a placeholder—such as “Custom Name” or “Your text here”—and then check the box to enable personalization.
Once published, the product will be marked as personalized. Imported orders with this product will display a “Personalization required” status and won’t proceed to fulfillment until you manually confirm the order.
Step 3: Add instructions for personalization and publish the product on Shopify
Enabling personalization in Printful doesn’t automatically allow customers to enter their details on your Shopify store—you’ll need to set this up separately. Add “personalized” or a similar word in the product title, and include clear instructions in the description explaining what can be customized and how customers should submit their details.
To collect personalization details from your customers, you can:
- Let buyers add personalization info in the order notes at checkout
- Collect it manually (e.g., via email)
- Use a third-party Shopify app (e.g., Zepto) or build your own solution
Step 4 (optional): Continue the personalization setup in Shopify
If you're using a third-party personalization tool, you may need to configure additional settings on your Shopify dashboard to enable customer input.
Printful recommends using the Zepto Product Personalizer app for this setup. To add a personalization field to your product page, follow the steps in our Zepto setup guide.
Learn more about using Zepto with Printful in our step-by-step guide
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